1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to serial dam communications and more particularly to identification and configuration of serially-connected communications devices.
2. State of the Art
In computer design and engineering, whereas technical benchmarks were once the prime differentiator among competing products, more recently, ease of use has assumed singular importance. Considerable research and development effort has been focused on the human engineering aspects of computers, particularly the user interface. Graphical user interfaces have now become the de facto industry standard.
Despite these developments, telecommunications has remained, at least to the uninitiated, a daunting aspect of computing. To the novice computer user, the numerous specifications required to establish a high-speed connection present an often insuperable challenge. At the same time, the range of available telecommunications services is rapidly expanding, offering, for example, seamless remote network access, online services with audio feedback, and transparent reception of faxes and voice messages. In order to provide easy, affordable access to these and other emerging telecommunications services, a need exists for high-performance, low-cost telecommunications platforms that support global fax, data and voice data streams in an intuitive way.
In the past, in order to enable a computer to operate with a particular communications device ("telecom adapter") attached to the serial port, the computer user has had to identify to the computer, and then configure, the communications device. If the user did not configure the telecom adapter properly, communications could not be established. Also, dedicated hardware circuitry has typically been required to exchange device identification between the telecom adapter and the host computer during the configuration phase. This special-purpose configuration hardware (including, for example, DIP switches, ID ROMs or ID wheels, and jumpers for circuit boards) contributes to the cost of the telecom adapter.